By Joanna Ho
An Asian girl notices her eyes don't look like her friends', and finds in them her mother, her grandmother, and her little sister.
A young girl sees that some of her classmates have big, round eyes with long lashes, and hers are different, eyes that kiss in the corners and glow like warm tea. Instead of wishing them away, she traces them home. Her eyes are her mama's eyes, and her amah's, and her little sister's, carrying the stories of the women in her family and the places they come from. The language builds, line by lyrical line, into pure pride, in her eyes and in everything they've seen and will one day see.
It takes a feature that Asian children are sometimes made to feel self-conscious about and makes it the single most beautiful thing in the book, tied to a whole line of women a girl is proud to belong to. For an Asian child it's a powerful mirror; for the rest of the class it reframes different as beautiful and mine. It's the most lyrical book in the set, with richer language and a more abstract idea, which is why it suits your strongest listeners, and it braids a self-love message together with a warm one about the women you come from.